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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jasin" data-source="post: 4893464" data-attributes="member: 7531">You are wrong.I'm operating on the basis that on the first reading, the paladin boosts appeared insane.After some discussion, I haven't changed my mind and they still appear insane, because the counterargument seems to boil down to "meh, it's +20 to damage, but it's just against a couple of guys per day" and "meh, it's fast healing ~17 at 10th level, but it'll run out in 15 rounds".These arguments do not convince me because I have played a lot of 3.5, and have seen the difference between having and not +20 to damage or fast healing 10, and they have had a profound effect on the encounter, even at significantly higher levels.It has also been my experience (supported on the whole by the collective experience I've read about on various forums) that being able to focus power and pour all your resources into a single encounter (or a couple) doesn't balance very well with inexhaustible power of lesser intensity. +20 to damage against 7 opponents day is way better than +4 to damage against 50 opponents per day.It also doesn't balance very well in terms party vs. monsters, because it's likely to be used to devastate the most important fights, running the danger of making anticlimactic the fights that are supposed to be the most memorable. This problem was commonly accepted to be at least one of the problems with psions, and to a lesser extent all spellcasters. It's such a common issue that there's a shorthand phrase for it, going nova, and it's rarely meant to indicate anything positive.My experience (and I thought common wisdom) suggest quite the opposite: ostensibly the psion is balanced because if he just pours all his power points into disintegrate after disintegrate, he'll have very little left for later. In practice, however, this means that the psion anticlimatically disintegrates one fight, and then calls for rest. This is either practical, in which case the psion is ready for another bout of disintegration spamming, or not, in which case the psion is bored and boring. That is not balance.A bit, yes. But despite the tone, the question was honest. If you (general you, not you personally) feel that the PFRPG paladin is just fine with over 700 hp of healing capacity at 20th, dealing +40 damage against some of the most iconic, ostensibly scariest foes, how did you manage to enjoy the game before, both playing a paladin and playing something else (that's not a shapechanged wizard, a shapechanged druid or a Divine Metamagic/Persistent Spell cleric)? How could the experience have been anything other than incredibly frustrating due to the characters' incompetence?No, I'm suggesting 3.5 is all sorts of messed up, and PFRPG, to the best of my ability to discern, seems all different sorts of messed up.This comes as a huge disappointment to me. Deciding to compete with a new edition by cleaning up the old was a very brave decision, and it had the potential for greatness: 3.5 was a good game, and a professional team putting in the effort to work out the problem with the benefit of years of experience could have made it truly great. Instead, my impression is that we have a different game, better than 3.5, but only slightly. Better, but not enough to outweigh the advantages of 3.5, namely extensive experience and the wealth of material.It's anecdotal, but my experience was that paladins were among the most impressive classes, aside from spellcasters played by players system-savvy abusers. They were not as fragile as spellcasters or light warriors (rogue or ranger), they were not as susceptible to magic as brutes (fighter or barbarian), they can heal (not that much, but better than anyone else except the cleric or druid), and they could do scary damage against their favoured foes when they tried (not all the time, but enough to put the fear of it into DMs, and enough to be appropriately remembered as the bane of single, powerful foes).I will, but mostly on the strength of the quality of Paizo's work so far. Which might not be completely reasonable, considering this quality is mostly found in adventure design rather than game mechanics design; in fact, these same overall excellent adventures often sport some incredibly inept mechanics design.But I don't think discussing or having an opinion about a game before trying it is invalid. I don't have the time to try each and every game available, so I must apply some selection process before I try them. Reading through a game and comparing it to previous similar experiences seems reasonable.I think you're very, very wrong here.3.5 undead already had too many hit dice compared to... well, anything; their CR, their hp, their BAB. This was one of the problems with 3.5 turning: CR 6 zombies that couldn't be turned by a 16th-level cleric because they had 20 HD. Piling on more HD is not what anyone wants to do with undead.Instead, Pathfinder increases undead BAB from weak to medium. This means that you don't need as many HD for your undead monster to be able to hit stuff.Since HD and BAB are linked in Pathfinder, that means d8 HD for undead.Since this means that undead would have phenomenally crap hp for their CR under 3.5 rules thanks to their Con -, Pathfinder takes a page from late 3.5 and applies Cha to undead hp, like other creatures apply Con. There is already a precedent for that in 3.5 core with undead using Cha instead of Con for concentration and rage, and almost all late 3.5 undead had Unholy Toughness (Cha to hp) as a "special ability" because the designers already realized that just piling on HD to achieve the desired number of hp had undesirable cascading effects, and that it was more elegant to bring undead more in line with other monsters by giving them a stat to use for hp.At the risk of being nasty again, I'm not convinced you can claim an in-depth understanding on the system if you so profoundly misunderstand a design decision like this.However, the perpetual arms race and obsolescence of relatively recent material is not fun, at least for me.Far be from me to claim that 3.5 was perfectly balanced, or that there was no power creep, but over it's lifetime at least it appeared to aim for the same (admittedly wide) range set by the PHB classes. The most powerful later classes were no more powerful than the most powerful PHB classes, and the weakest later classes were no weaker than the PHB's weakest.Despite claims of backwards compatiblity, Pathfinder unambiguously ramps up the PC power level. This is desirable to the extent to which it makes up for the power creep over 3.5's lifetime, but if the Pathfinder classes are appreciably more powerful than all or most of 3.5, what am I to do with my 3.5 material? What am I to do with Paizo's own 3.5 adventure Paths? Just ramping up the monster power level and the future adventure path difficulty to compensate for the compensation isn't the answer. It leaves us right where we were at the end of 3.5, but without the benefit of experience in identifying problems.As far as I see it, Pathfinder set out with two goals: to provide an in-print engine for Paizo's adventures after the end of 3.5; and to fix the issues with 3.5, many of which were well established and discussed in depth.It obviously succeeds at the former, but for the latter it appears to have gone in much the same direction that 4E was initially criticized for: in short, fixing what ain't broke, and thereby introducing whole new problems. There's even some of the same rhetoric: everything sucked before, but not anymore.4E at least (despite the fans' wishful thinking) never claimed or attempted to be 3.5 only better, but was intended as its own thing from the start. Pathfinder and its fans seem to have went from "3.5 thrives!" to "Pathfinder rules, 3.5 drools!" with alarming haste.</blockquote>

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